Katherine C. M. Adams

We have a lecture coming up at @empac_rpi this Thursday with @peligrietzer , which builds on his fascinating work on the structures of ‘ambient aesthetics’—moods, vibes, and other qualities that give us a sense of an artwork’s (or art world’s) formal unity. At EMPAC this Thursday on the 11th, Grietzer considers what is unique about the structures of meaning within art and poetic thought, through articulating the worldmaking properties of AI’s mathematical systems. The talk draws on his recent research connecting poetic form, art and aesthetic philosophies of the Romantic movement, and the architectures of artificial intelligence. For Grietzer, machine learning’s computational structures illustrate art’s power to effect meaning through its material force. -- I wanted to take the occasion to recap the other talks I’ve organized this year within our Curatorial program, as part of a series of contributions focusing on art and its technological conditions. It drew on contemporary theory and scholarship from the visual and performing arts, and adjacent fields. -- On March 21, Ezekiel Dixon-Román shared his newest work on the structures of computation. He examined how algorithms may reflect and become haunting forces as they embed racial logics and forms of power into technological systems. Dixon-Román spoke about how a politics of representation is often our default way of evaluating AI’s ethics, and proposed an alternate way of assessing of its systems of recursivity. He spoke about the difference between a self-reflexive ‘autopoietic’ conception of algorithms versus a transformative ‘allopoietic’ one, and offered reflections from his new work on an idea of ‘black noise.’ On February 22, Marina Vishmidt’s talk “On the Recursivity of Care” considered filmic processes and moving image works that exhibit the entropy of maintenance. Vishmidt focused on how, rather than becoming an object of representation, maintenance more often provides the conditions of representation. Repetitive processes of housework, as in the early films of Margaret Raspé, are changed by their documentation and exploded by the mode this documentation takes. [Continued in comments]

In February I took part in a panel discussion for the @rockbundartmuseum that's now online! Focusing on Shubigi Rao's work and practice in relation to her recent RAM exhibition "These Petrified Paths," the program included presentations by myself and @alfonse.chiu , and a discussion with @xzhunowell and @shubigi . Grateful to RAM for inviting me to this, after finding my writing on the show, and for our lively conversation that examined Rao's practice from multiple angles to ask, 'who is Shubigi?' You can watch the full program at the link in my bio. - From the video description: "Who is Shubigi: The Edified Wrath With Ecological Groundedness" is a panel discussion for Shubigi Rao's exhibition These Petrified Paths at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai. Featuring Shubigi Rao, writer and curator Katherine Adams and artist, writer, and curator Alfonse Chiu, as well as RAM Artistic Director X Zhu-Nowell. Introduced by RAM Curator and Head of Research, Public Programs and Publications Joni Zhu.

So pleased to have @ligiamlewis with us at @empac_rpi for two performances of the stage work ‘A Plot / A Scandal’, on February 16th and February 17th, at 7pm. Really thrilled to be able to show this work—if you’re in the area, do join us Friday or Saturday! The piece is showing for the first time on the East Coast in the US. ✨️ The link for the event & tickets is in my bio. Hope to see you there! — Dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis’s performance A Plot / A Scandal takes up plot in its multiple meanings. Rebellious fantasies become schemes against the limits of narration. Mythical, historical, and political vignettes scandalize landed property’s legacy. Where plot is a scandal, the stage gives itself over to the pleasures of transgression. Here, Lewis explores what it might mean to be caught in the act. In the artist’s own words, “A plot exposed, a foul deed enacted, invites scandal. In the spirit of revolution or romantic musings, scandals provoke an imagining of the impossible. Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? And how does it expose where society places its limits? If life is a scandal waiting to be plotted, how do we position ourselves within its matrix? Immoral and lacking propriety, scandals are incidents where fantasy and pleasure take center stage.” Production still: A Plot / A Scandal. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Moritz Freudenberg.

Please join us at @empac_rpi on Friday at 7pm for 'Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in', a program featuring Shen Xin and Ali Van, including a sound performance that marks their first public project as the collaborative AX Archive. Based on a new film of the same by Shen, the event includes a performance, a screening of the film (showing in North America for the first time), and a workshop. As part of this program, I was also generously invited by the artists to design and lead the workshop in connection with the project. Stimulated by Shen and Xin’s interests in ecology and language, questions I’m asking as I prepare this segment are: How do processes of translation and scripting affect relationships to land? How do origin stories and etymologies become forces that root us in a geology of language? Might we explore the connections between indigeneity, translation, and shared meaning by understanding images and archives as the territory to which language clings once its semantics drift away from the places and objects it first symbolized? And further, what if it is image or sound that becomes the lost ‘land’ of language, keeping afloat what is lost and gained in translation? -- Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in is a program organized around a new film of the same name by artist Shen Xin. In the film, overlapping forms of storytelling reflect on the power of language to forge commonalities. Friday's program opens with a spatialized audio performance from Ali Van and Shen Xin, together as AX Archive, that mirrors the narrative style of the film. The North American film premiere of Grounds of Coherence follows. The program concludes with a workshop designed and facilitated by curator Katherine C.M. Adams, at the invitation of the artists. It explores how origin myths might create their own sonic, linguistic, and social archipelagos. The workshop is a live session that audience members are welcome to observe or actively participate in, drawing from their own creative projects. Writing materials will be provided. -- Images: Film stills: Grounds of Coherence, 2023. Courtesy the artist.

I wrote about Shubigi Rao's "These Petrified Paths" at Rockbund Art Museum for @e -flux Criticism Here--where territory, ecology, and the written word are intertwined--power's appropriation of literature is a sort of land grab, censorship an annexation. The show is also an important and complex contribution to our current conversations on colonial violence, genocide (a new film commission focuses on Armenia), and how these take root in and through material culture. Link in bio for full text @shubigi @rockbundartmuseum

>> Today is the last day of the 2nd edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, for which I served as a Co-Curator across over more than 2 years of volunteer organization and collaboration in our dedicated 3-person curatorial collective. You can still catch the last day of TIAB’s Alchemy Gallery exhibition today, including Felipe Baeza’s beautiful work above. Our central exhibition at EFA Project Space, ‘Conflictual Distance,’ posed one of the central questions that informed the thematic umbrella of the project, ‘Contact Zone’. From the curatorial intro of EFA: “When exhibitions are so often asked to carry out various forms of site-specific placemaking, called on to speak to an immediately present public, how can we make visible those experiences that are not fully legible from within an exhibition site's immediate surroundings?” Read C-Print Journal’s review/feature of Alchemy and EFA in my bio. You can also join a closing party at Alchemy today from 4-6pm @theimmigrantartistbiennial >> At the end of May 2023, I received the Ramapo Curatorial Prize from @ccsbard , awarded yearly to a second-year student at the Center. My provisional proposal asked: What happens when an artistic idea is expressed in the ‘wrong’ medium? And is inspired by reflections on ‘queer’ materiality: how might one decouple artistic production from the re-production of given infrastructures? Can a sculpture, for example, be a hyperlink that reflects on the astructural nature of contemporary networks? This iteration of my curatorial research is partly inspired by Nairy Bagrahmian, an artist I’ve long admired for her ways of making sculptures that act like hinge-points—iterating the spatial architectures of their surrounding environments while torquing into corporeal forms. Watch for the realization of the Ramapo exhibition in Fall 2024. >> In December 2023, I had the opportunity to go to Shanghai in connection with a week-long residency I received from the International Awards from Art Criticism , after winning their First Prize in 2022. I’ve been grateful to have such vital support for both my writing practice and curatorial research.

Projects & public programs I'm curating this season at @empac_rpi -- tix available now, join us Jan thru May! Marina Rosenfeld @marinahhmr - Residency for µ (mu), an inquiry into dubplates' material grooves and the sculptural substrata of sound. Artist talk JAN. 24 André Lepecki - Talk on time and choreopolitics: 'The Dispute Over Movement and the Non-Time of the Struggle. (Notes for a performance on the way)' JAN 25 Shen Xin & Ali Van / AX Archives – Accessing shared histories through linguistic situations. Screening of Shen Xin's new film 'Grounds of Coherence # 1 / but this is the language we met in’ + performance by Shen and Van together as AX Archive + live workshop session FEB 9 Ligia Lewis @ligiamlewis – Rebellious fantasies and schemes against the limits of narration in ‘A Plot / A Scandal’ (stage version), showing for the first time in NY/East Coast. Performances FEB 16 & 17 Marina Vishmidt – Through the lens of her research on art, labor, and value, Vishmidt engages with the EMPAC archive in a talk on FEB 22 Ezekiel Dixon-Román - Shares new research on computation, recursivity, and their links to raciality in a talk engaging Black radical anti-colonial thought and critical philosophies of technology MAR 21 Theo Jean Cuthand (co-organized with Vic Brooks, Kathy High, Branda Miller as part of iEAR Presents) – Screens a film and speaks about his artistic practice through an Indigiqueer lens MAR 26 Peli Greitzer – Speaks on the worldmaking possibilities of AI in relation to poetic form, philosophies of Romantic art, and ambient aesthetics such as 'moods', 'vibes' APR 11 Onye Ozuzu - WIP dance performance exploring how architectures haunt the body. Composite sites along the transatlantic, made virtual, become exoskeleton, container, & mask APR 23 Image credits: 1. Marina Rosenfeld, 'The Agonists', 2023. Install detail, Museum Art.Plus. 2. Shen Xin, 'Grounds of Coherence #1 ', film still, 2023. Courtesy the artist. 3. Ligia Lewis, 'A Plot / A Scandal', Photo: Moritz Freudenberg. 4. Production still, Onye Ozuzu, Space Carcasses, 2023. Courtesy the artist.

Happy to share this program I'm curating @empac_rpi in Troy. It takes place Thurs, Dec. 7, 6pm. If you'll be near us in upstate NY, please join to experience works by these incredible artists! >>> - Please join us at @empac_rpi Thursday, December 7, 2023 at 6PM for "In Pursuit: Short Films,” featuring works by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Bi Gan, Gelare Khoshgozaran, and Miko Revereza, as well as a live performative presentation by Khoshgozaran. “In Pursuit” presents short films that track itineraries through exile and statelessness. “In Pursuit” considers how, where shrinking political horizons manifest as a loss of access to specific geographies, film becomes a fraught terrain. The program draws out common threads between artists’ approaches to the moving image as the latter is forced into a “stateless” mode (whether actual or implied). Featured films imagine journeys undertaken in environments that threaten the loss of territorial access—where presence at a certain location is prohibited on geopolitical grounds or becomes increasingly impossible. Chase, evasion, urgent travel, and outlawed movement figure in these navigations. Here, mobility exists in terms of tactics and strategies, rather than in terms of the cosmopolitan freedom to travel. Following the screening, one of the featured artists, Gelare Khoshgozaran, will give a performative presentation about (as she writes) political subjecthood and haunting in the ‘society of the archive’. Khoshgozaran’s contribution is commissioned specially for this program. Image 1: Dir. Bi Gan, The Poet and Singer, 2012, film still. Courtesy Grasshopper Film. Image 2: Gelare Khoshgozaran, Preview of The Mystery of Violence, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. @basel.abb @ruanne.ar @rearleftist @mikorevereza

I’m very pleased to have published a new essay in @e_flux Journal’s November issue, “From Tragic Mulatto to Cinematic Blackout.” The essay begins from an examination of a stock character common to 20th-century film (also literature), the “tragic mulatto.” I trace the afterlives of this figure and examine how the trope gradually came to symbolize something more than just racial ambiguity or an ethnic type. I argue that it ultimately allegorized the supposed limits of Black women as critical subjects socially capable of resisting formulations of community that bind to paradigms of governance aligned with repressive mechanisms. While the “tragic mulatto” remains a reactionary personality, the essay examines the possibilities raised by her dialectical opposite–which I examine through the filmic figure of the “blackout.” The essay inquires into Kathleen Collins’s groundbreaking Losing Ground, teasing out the seemingly un-studied undercurrent of the “tragic mulatto” within the film, and traces the latent presence of a similar motif in Fanon’s diagnoses of subjectivity under colonialism. It also looks to the relationship between the “tragic mulatto” and anxieties around the limits of ethnic kinship, as well as how this anxiety unfolds on a representational level. Finally, it questions the use of strict epistemological “standpoints” for political legitimation, drawing on crucial precedents from Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, in addition to Kara Keeling’s writings on film. I developed this essay well before October and as a result it was not designed to respond to the ongoing violence and humanitarian crises that have hit a peak in the past weeks, the articulation of which is often so suppressed. However, I do think that there is a strain in the text regarding solidarity beyond kinship that is still relevant to this challenging moment. Very grateful to the editors for featuring this piece. The essay is part of a series of texts for the Journal on “Negative Anthropology” organized by Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams, a thematic which seemed to me like a perfect overview for the essay. Lnk in bio

The exhibition 'Shifting Center' opens next Friday, November 3rd @empac_rpi . Please join us for the opening night 6-10pm ✨️ and you can see the project on view at EMPAC Nov 3-18, with offsite programs Oct 27-29 💫 Repost: @empac_rpi ‘Shifting Center’ stages processes of listening to infrasonic landscapes, acoustic architectures, and unsounded instruments across multiple scales of time. The exhibition poses sculpture as time-based and presents it with moving-image and spatial-audio installations across the concert hall, proscenium stage, and studios at @empac_rpi .⁣ ⁣ Opening: November 3rd, 6-10pm.⁣ Exhibition: November 3rd - 18th, Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm*. *Saturday November 11th, open 5-10pm.⁣ ⁣ Location: Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 44 8th St, Troy, NY 12180⁣ ⁣ Drawing its title from a term in the field of acoustics that describes the perceived dislocation in the position of a sound source, ’Shifting Center’ features artworks that listen to the material traces of not only cultural belongings, but tectonic and meteorological events.⁣ ⁣ The project considers two opposing tendencies: dislocation, or how objects, artworks, and cultural belongings are taken from their context and often silenced through museological mechanisms of preservation and display; and location, or how architectural acoustics impact exhibitions as resonant spaces of situated listening.⁣ ⁣ Engaging the unique technical capacities of EMPAC, ‘Shifting Center’ locates and listens to contemporary artworks that are themselves locating and listening to past events in the ever-changing present.⁣ ⁣ Contributions by: Julian Abraham “Togar”, Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur & Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón & Igor de Gandarias, Hugo Esquinca, Maurice Louca, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Nancy Mounir, Gala Porras-Kim, Micah Silver, and Clarissa Tossin & Michelle Agnes Magalhães⁣ ⁣ ‘Shifting Center’ is curated by Nida Ghouse and Vic Brooks with Katherine C. M. Adams and M. Elijah Sueuga⁣ ⁣ Image: Tania Candiani, For the Animals / Concert 1, 2020 (still). Two-channel HD video with sound. Courtesy of the artist.

I had the opportunity to visit the inaugural @biennaleson in Sion, Switzerland as well as Martigny and surrounding areas briefly this past week--a project with a fantastic range of artists and featuring work across a range of disciplines. 'Sound' is given a wide-ranging articulation across the biennale as source material generated through artists' intimate engagements with the acoustics of featured sites; as a latent presence in large-scale scores of installations and public interventions; as experimental compositions and performances; as amplification of distant sites and architectures. --A great experience made even better by the hospitality of the project team and excellent company for the opening days! Though granted short stills are antithetical to the duration of so many works, here's a small selection of mostly visual snippets, translating into image some brief moments from this otherwise acoustically-driven project. --From one of the key venues in Sion, 'La Centrale': (...and extracting what I could with my very bad phone camera!) 1. Éric Baudelaire, 'The Glove', 2020 2. Éric Baudelaire, 'Four Foat Tires', 2022 3. Snippet from Axel Crerrenand, 'Chaotic Arrangement for 66 Voices', 2023 4. Install view with Crys Cole, 'Recurrences', 2023 at right and work by David Horvitz at back 5. Snippet from Dominique Blas, 'Light House', 2013 6. Detail from Agustin Maurs, 'The Story of the Wolf Tone,' 2023 7. Exterior of the La Centrale venue, a decommissioned hydroelectric plant

Another article, another screenshot 😅 So thrilled to have my new article "Withdrawls of the 'Image' and Ruptures of Archival Form" published as a peer-reviewed, original research article in Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (University of California Press) Link in bio to full text! (Link gives temporary free access) ✨️ My article examines how artist Walid Raad's 'The Atlas Group' explored not only the instability of historical archives (as is often argued of this quasi-fictional, multi-year project), but gestured toward a larger infrastructure of imaging that had been severely thwarted by the fallout of the Lebanese Civil War. Within 'The Atlas Group'--both in its documents and across Raad's performance-lectures--images undergo extreme transformations that often register at what I describe as "latent infrastructures of cinematic projection and time-based narration that have been absented from collective experience." This research draws on Raad's performances, his accounts of the work, the project itself, and writing by peers of the artist, among other reference points. It emerged from my broader sense that the ontology of the 'image' in art theory may often remain overdetermined by analog precedents. As a result, I also engage theoretical work that examines the tendency of digital media to enact nearly 'performative' architectures of image reproduction (a point made by Boris Groys, for example). So pleased to have this article in a journal I myself read and cite frequently, and which has published work by so many scholars and thinkers I admire.